No, this is not the first time. Scaremongering by frontier AI CEOs has been going on since ChatGPT came out, every time with a massive investment following.

OpenAI got $10 billion from Microsoft after Sam Altman claimed AI could lead to extinction of humanity.

Anthropic got similar multi-billion dollar funding from Amazon and Google after warning AI could develop biological weapons.

xAI got similarly massive funding after Elon Musk predicted a terminator-style future.

If you don't accept this as "empirical evidence", then there's nothing to discuss.